• As overdose deaths climbed, DEA agents in New Mexico repeatedly let huge fentanyl shipments hit the streets while pursuing bigger trafficking cases, a strategy critics say gambled with public safety.
• Veteran agent-turned-whistleblower David Howell says colleagues watched at least 1.8 million pills change hands, then faced overdose deaths — including a toddler’s — even as internal watchdogs cleared the tactics.
• Federal rules that once told agents to seize fentanyl quickly were loosened in 2024, intensifying debate over risky surveillance tactics and drawing comparisons to the Fast and Furious gun-walking scandal.

ALBUQUERQUE — Even as it battled the deadliest drug epidemic in American history, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration permitted hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills to hit the streets of New Mexico between 2023 and 2025, according to three current and former DEA agents and government records reviewed by the Associated Press.

DEA agents repeatedly monitored shipments of fentanyl pills — but did not seize them — as federal prosecutors sought to bring bigger criminal cases against traffickers of a synthetic opioid that the White House last year designated a “ weapon of mass destruction.”

Agents and experts, however, said the tactic amounted to a gamble with public safety that potentially imperiled communities in and around Albuquerque and may have violated U.S. Justice Department rules intended to safeguard the public.

“We poisoned our community to make...

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